ATI MAXX technology for 2 ATI PCI-e videocards?

[wrugoin]

Reading articles about combining two PCI-e videocards made me think about the old SLI Monster 2 days and the Voodoo5 disaster. Knowing that at it's most basic, SLI uses multiple GPUs to render seperate (every other) lines of the same frame. Something that we're now seeing again as Nvidia is now the owner of the old 3Dfx technology. I also remember that ATI had a solution for SLI with its ATI Rage Fury MAXX, where, like the voodoo5 cards, it had one videocard with two GPUs onboard. If I remember correctly, the technology behind that duo-GPU solution was that each GPU rendered every other frame.

Something for discussion is that if Nvidia owns the patients and technology behind SLI technology, do you think it's possible that we see ATI come out with a two PCI-e videocard option where it uses technology similar to the Rage fury MAXX?

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Sony DRU-510A DVD-RW<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by wrugoin on 10/24/04 01:14 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[BeyRevRa]

I think anything is possible, especially with the "tag... your it" mentality that Nvidia and ATI have had towards each other lately. I think that ATI will feel they *have to answer to this* somehow. We will see though, I'm sure they are waiting to see the response to SLI first.

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[wrugoin]

Does anyone have any articles or reviews on ATI's answer to SLI? I've been searching and can't find much on the issue.

---MY RIG---
MSI Nforce2 w/ Athlon XP 1700+
512MB PC-2700 Kingmax
Geforce 2 GTS (*blush*)
WD800JB 80GB,IMB 20GB
USB 2.0 WD 15GB HDD
Pioneer 16X Slot DVD
Sony DRU-510A DVD-RW

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

So far their answers have been they are not concerned with it. There are a bunch of old posts in here somewhere with their responses at a bunch of hardware sites, but they say basicsally they are not concerned.

Of course really this is more likely a PR stance and that they are using their other experiences with multiple GPUs to come up with a possible answer. They do have multi card/vpu solutions for Flight Sims, the dual VPU R9800MAXX (which was never finished [but there are engineering samples out there]),and they also have large arrays for servers, so they have some experience, but they might be waiting to see how ALX does compared to SLI and then see if they would be better off with that type of a solution. Of course who knows, maybe ATI really doesn't expect it to be a success, but I would be surprised if they aren't hedging their bets.


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[eden]

It would be very interesting and where I think will most benefit is airflow. Both cooled GPUs are facing an empty area in front of them, and are able to exhaust the heat. Whilst a dual video card solution will have one card being too close to the other for comfort.
That may be advantageous for ATi to do IMO. Latency times would be an issue though as well as bandwidth if PCIe 16X isn't used, I'd assume. (consider both are synchronized to run at the same speeds, then they'd have to therefore send twice the bandwidth to the PCIe bus.)

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<font color=blue>Ede</font color=blue>

 

[Crashman]

Not to forget ATI's previous problems with the Furry Max, er, Fury MAXX, involved bus sharing. With PCIe they can circumvent that problem by treating the x16 bus as 2 x8's.

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[eden]

Why would it be a problem and how could you route two buses on one slot?

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[Crashman]

Actually if you think about it, PCIe x16 is like having 16 busses on one slot. That is, it has 16 individual pathways.

AGP had exactly 1 pathway that was 32-bits wide.

You see companies talking about ways to make boards with 2 PCIe x16 slots each with 8 pathways, using a chip to negotiate it, and nVidia incorporating such circuitry into their next high end chipset, but ATI could do the same thing on the card and thus consume one slot.

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